Strangled (30 page)

It
was two, maybe three seconds after I got into the newsroom when Peter Martin appeared at my desk the way the Japanese appeared at Pearl Harbor, which is to say without warning and certainly without apology. He was accompanied by a bald man in sunglasses who looked as out of place at a newspaper as I would at a Milan fashion show.

“This is Buck,” Martin said to me.

“Hi, Buck,” I said.

Buck nodded but didn’t speak, which, for reasons I can’t explain, didn’t actually surprise me.

“What’s this?” Martin said, pointing down at the black dog sitting beside me.

“That’s Huck,” I said. I had stopped home on my way in from police headquarters to get him, and he smacked his tail against my metal desk at the sound of his name.

“Does he bite?”

What is it with these people?

“Viciously,” I replied. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”

Martin slowly, tentatively slid over to the other side of the desk, then said to me, “Come down to my office, would you? We need to get a definitive plan going. And why don’t you leave Huck here.”

That last sentence wasn’t a question.

I told him I’d be right in, snapped up my telephone, and punched out the number for Deirdre Hayes in Las Vegas, Nevada. I had already called her twice — on the way down to see H. Gordon Thomas, and on the way back, leaving her messages both times. This time it rang through to her voice mail again, which I didn’t like at all. I asked her to call my cell phone as soon as humanly possible.

It was Sunday, early in the afternoon, and as such, the newsroom was operating on a skeletal staff, meaning few editors, no copy editors yet, and just a handful of reporters chasing down the typical fires, car crashes, and press conferences by especially opportunistic politicians who know that the competition for coverage is always weakest on a weekend. I instructed Huck to lie down, which he did with a long groan, followed by a loud sigh, and I made my way through the long newsroom and into Peter Martin’s glass-walled office.

When I walked in, Vinny Mongillo was lovingly unwrapping what we in New England would call a tuna-fish submarine, but those in less educated parts of America might refer to it as a grinder, a melt, or possibly a hoagie. In any part of the country, this wouldn’t have smelled good, so I simply tried to put it out of my mind. Meantime, Justine gave me a look that I believed to be one of apology. Martin sat at the head of the table, peering down at a legal pad peppered with notes. No one said anything, unless you counted Mongillo’s soft moan of satisfaction after his first bite.

Finally, Peter kicked things off, saying, “All right, Vinny, put down the food for a minute and tell us what the hell is going on here.”

Vinny put down the food, in itself an uncharacteristically selfless act. He looked around at the three of us and said flatly, “My mother was a Strangler victim in 1963. I was a baby. I never got to know her. I was ten years old when I overheard my aunt and my grandmother talking about it — right after Albert DeSalvo was killed.”

He drew a breath and continued. “I studied the hell out of the case when I was a teenager. I wrote to police officers. I read books. I called prosecutors. I was convinced, like a lot of others were, that DeSalvo didn’t kill my mother — that DeSalvo didn’t kill anyone at all.

“When Jack received these letters, I was going to tell you — all of you. But then I decided, you know what, this is my chance to do something about what I always thought was a massive deceit. This was my chance to have an impact on behalf of the woman who brought me into this world, but who I never got the chance to know. So I kept my mouth shut. Because if I told you about my history, you rightfully wouldn’t have allowed me to work on the story.”

I sat there spellbound, staring at a guy who never, ever stops surprising me in one good way or another. You think you know someone, you think you’re giving him more credit than he could possibly deserve, yet under all that flesh is someone who’s even better, smarter, and more sensitive than you can possibly allow yourself to believe.

Peter Martin, I could see, was also enraptured, but not to the point of silence. He didn’t have that luxury. He tapped his pen a few times on the legal pad that sat on the coffee table before him and said, “Thank you, Vinny. That’s all very understandable. But why were you arrested? What did you do?”

Vinny flashed me a knowing look, mostly because, well, I already knew. Then he said, “The knife. Many years ago, I was given the blood-soaked knife found in Walpole State Prison that was used to stab Albert DeSalvo to death. One of the lead detectives on the case, Bob Walters, the guy who was trying to help Jack out before he died, he gave it to me.”

More silence. I couldn’t peel my eyes off of Vinny, which may seem a little weird, but so be it. Justine looked from Vinny to Martin to me. Martin bounced his pen on the legal pad a few more times and said, “But Vinny, how did the cops suddenly find out in the middle of this investigation that you had the knife?”

He told them that story as well. Still more silence. Martin nodded a whole lot. He exchanged a long look with Justine Steele, but neither said anything.

Finally, Martin looked at me and said, “Jack, bring us up to date.”

I shared with them my suspicions about Mac Foley — the fact he knew Lauren Hutchens’s apartment number, his history of being a bitter rival of Commissioner Hal Harrison, his presence around Elizabeth Riggs on the morning she lost her license and might have been slated for murder. I told them of my morning meeting with Harrison and his unveiled threats. I told them of my later meeting with DeSalvo’s lawyer, H. Thomas Gordon, and explained how pretty much the only thing I got from him was frustrated.

I was just finishing up when Barbara, the paper’s longtime newsroom receptionist, flung the glass door open to Martin’s office and said, “You’re going to want to turn on the television.”

So Martin did, to CNN, where a rather comely reporter — a female, by the way — was standing outside Boston Police headquarters with a microphone in her perfectly manicured hand. Across the top of the screen, the slogan “The Strangler Returns” was written in bright red. On the bottom, “Breaking News” flashed in orange.

“Again, ladies and gentlemen, my Boston Police sources are telling me that Detective Mac Foley was taken into custody within the last half hour as what a high-level police official describes as, and I’m quoting him here, ‘a person of interest’ in the current Strangler investigation. Foley was one of the detectives on both this case and the strangulations from over forty years ago.

“Those same sources tell me that evidence confiscated from Foley’s house has been tied to what has been described to me as a ‘potential victim.’ He has been suspended with pay by Commissioner Hal Harrison, forced to turn over his gun, and is now being questioned by an FBI interrogator who was brought in specifically to handle this aspect of the case.

“We’ll update you as we know it. But one more time, a potentially major and blockbuster break this afternoon in the case of the current Boston stranglings. Back to you, Gray.”

The screen quickly flashed to a commercial for adult diapers, which I thought Peter Martin and Justine Steele might need at the moment. Me, I was too stunned to speak or even think, though I did wonder what kind of parents name their kid Gray.

As far as the story went, part of me felt vindicated, that my suspicions had panned out, that the cops had apparently found something in Foley’s house tying him to Elizabeth Riggs. Part of me was quietly elated that the case appeared to have been cracked, that the letters with the driver’s licenses of recent victims would stop. Yet another part of me, the one with those little shards of information knocking around my brain, felt uneasy about it all, like there was something else at play here. But the bigger part of me, maybe an embarrassing part of me, was fuming that I had just watched the whimpering end to this enormous story on a national cable network, rather than having broken it myself on the pages of my
Boston Record
. I got the letters. I saw the victims. I did the investigative work. I felt the guilt. This was my story, from beginning to its presumed end, and I didn’t want to see any part of it broken on TV.

Sitting there, my aggravation turned to controlled fury. I was the one who developed the intuitive suspicions about Mac Foley. I passed them along to Hal Harrison. And then he burnt me to a crisp, leaking to CNN what should have been mine. If there’s one thing a newspaper reporter hates most, and trust me, there are a lot of things a newspaper reporter hates a lot, it’s watching a story that he or she has owned get advanced by some blow-dried, over-powdered lightweight on cable TV.

Martin looked at me and said in an unusually high-pitched voice, “Jack?”

Before I could answer, my ass started vibrating, not out of anger, but from the phone call that I seemed to have been receiving. I glanced at the cell and saw it was a 702 number, so I said disgustedly, “Let me just take this first.”

I gave it my usual “Flynn here.” A woman’s voice said, “Jack, it’s Deirdre Hayes. I never got to thank you for that money you left on the counter. So, well, thank you. You’re a really sweet guy.”

I could listen to compliments all day — except today. So I said, “Deirdre, you’ve caught me in the middle of a bunch of things.” Like my complete and total career demise. “Tell me what you have?”

“You’ve got to see it, Jack.”

I was quickly losing patience, and the truth was, I had very little left to lose. “Deirdre, I’m in Boston.”

She said, “So am I. I brought the stuff out here to you. Least I could do. After my shift last night, I jumped on a red-eye through Chicago, and now I’m in the
Record
lobby.”

“This
Record
? My lobby? I’ll be right down.”

As I turned to walk out, Mongillo, Steele, and Martin were all still mesmerized by the television coverage. I called out, “Be right back.” I paused at the door as something struck me. “Hey Vinny, did you ever get results from those DNA tests before you were arrested?”

He smiled a knowing smile at me and said, “Ah, Fair Hair, someone finally posed the question I was waiting to be asked. Good on you for doing it.”

I said, “Well?”

He picked up the remainder of his tuna sub in one of his hairy, oversize mitts. “Not yet,” he said, staring down at it. “But any minute, I hope.”

It’s probably more important to note what Deirdre Hayes wasn’t dressed in rather than what she was. She wasn’t wearing that miniskirt or the skintight tank top she had on the day before, or the dark eyeliner that made it look like she charged by the hour rather than by the drink. She was turned out on this Sunday afternoon in a pair of jeans and an expensive-looking sweater, and her fabulously wavy auburn hair was pulled back in a bun pinned to the back of her head. All of which is to say that today, she looked like someone you could introduce to your mother, which made her appearance of the day before even more of a turn-on. If this is hard to understand, that’s because it should be.

She jumped up from one of the settees that sat in the floor-to-ceiling windows and gave me a kiss on the cheek, as if we had known each other a long time, rather than exactly one day. I gave her arm a squeeze and thanked her profusely for flying all the way across the country to deliver whatever it was that she had. She explained that her father would have wanted it that way, and that I was too nice to leave that money on the table for her. I told her she was way too kind. We could have gone on and on, but I didn’t have the time. Nodding at the folder she was carrying under her left arm, I said, “So let’s take a look at what you have.”

She sat back down, and I sat down beside her. Reaching carefully into the folder, she said, “I knew there was this other box. I just knew it. So I went down into the cellar late yesterday afternoon before my shift and looked for it. Dad had another trunk that he kept down there. I had to break the lock with a hammer, and sure enough, there was a small box inside.”

By now she had pulled out a small sheath of what looked to be old papers, and she handed them to me, saying, “He never told me about these. He never told anyone in the family. But this makes it a whole lot easier to understand why he was so tortured by this case.”

She paused, her eyes welling up, and added, “I wish I had known.”

I put the stack of about nine sheets of paper on the glass-top coffee table in front of us, then picked the first one up carefully in my hands. It was a sheet of lined notebook paper, the kind you might pull out of a wired binder, and indeed, the left side had the little broken circles that showed that was exactly what was done.

The date was scrawled in black ink, in crude, adolescent penmanship, at the top of the page: “June 15, 1962.”

Below, written in the same hand, the note read, “Detective Walters, You were supposed to find Yvette before anyone else. Next time, I promise. I killed her in the kitchen. When she was dead, I dragged her into the living room. I had sex with her on the floor. Others will die. The Phantom Fiend.”

I put the sheet down and picked up the next one. On the same lined paper, in the same pen, by the same hand, the date “July 2, 1962” was scrawled at the top. Below it read, “Detective Walters, Her name is Paulina. I strangled her in her own bed. You need to go save her sorry soul.” It then gave her address, in the Dorchester section of Boston. It was signed, “The Phantom Fiend.”

And so it went for seven more letters, all of them addressed to Detective Walters, all of them signed by the Phantom Fiend, most of them alerting him to the presence of a body that had yet to be discovered, a couple apologizing that they had been found by someone else.

My head, for every obvious reason, was spinning or swimming or whatever heads do when they can barely process the staggering, earth-shaking information flowing into them. How did the news media not know about these letters? Why did police keep them quiet? Were there handwriting samples taken? Fingerprints? Anything to tie these letters to Albert DeSalvo?